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satisfaction. By 1937, after five years in power, he was in a position to bring
forward a new constitution to replace the one enacted by the Free State
with effect from December 6, 1922, and to have it pass. It is clear that he
tried to recognize the republican tradition by makirig a distinction
between the nation, the matter of the first three articles of the
Constitution, and the state, the matter of Articles 4 to 11. The Preamble
pays tribute to the Irish people and their "unremitting struggle to regain
the rightful independence of our Nation." Article 2 declares that "the
national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland, its islands and the
territorial seas." Article 3 begins: "Pending the re-integration of the
national territory," but then goes on to accept that the jurisdiction of the
Parliament and government extends only to the twenty-six counties estab–
lished as subject to the laws of the Irish Free State. These provisions have
weathered many disputes in law, including a dissenting judgment in
Russell v. Fanning (1988) in which Justice Hederman said that the reuni–
fication of the national territory is "by the provisions of the Preamble to
the Constitution and of Article 3 of the Constitution a constitutional
imperative and not one the pursuit or non-pursuit of which is within the
discretion of the government or any organ of the state." This view was
later endorsed by the Supreme Court in McGimpsey v. Ireland (1990). I
interpret Hederman as saying that the reunification of the national territo–
ry is a constitutional imperative rather than a policy to be pursued or not
according to the wishes of the government that happens to be in power.
But the fact is that no government since 1937 has in any consistent degree
obeyed the instruction. Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Fein, is the only
contemporary politician who continues to speak of "the constitutional
imperative of pursuing Irish unity." Indeed, de Valera seems to have
accepted, after 1932, that there was nothing he could do to get rid of
Partition. He continued to bring the issue up in discussions with the
Bri tish government in 1932, 1936, 1938, and later years. But the Anglo–
Irish Agreement, in April 1938, promised the Northern Parliament that it
would never be separated from the United Kingdom. The part that
Northern Ireland played in the Second World War was a further bond of
relation to the United Kingdom, a fact embodied in the Ireland Act, 1949.
De Valera seems to have given up the ghost of Irish unity in 1938, though
he continued to keep the aspiration at least notionally alive. He regarded it
as the most acute tragedy of his life that he had failed to bring Parti tion to
a peaceful end.
One of the consequences of de Valera's sad belief, as early as 1938, that
he could do nothing to bring about Irish unity was the handing over of
republican conviction, in effect, to the IRA especially in the years of the
war, and the establishing of a new republican party, Sean MacBride's Clann
